Month: March 2017

A few hundred years ago, the notions of heaven and hell, of God and Lucifer, were respected themes for composers, poets, and painters. Milton’s Paradise Lost contains the idea of Lucifer endeavoring to defeat Christ and regain his former position in paradise. Raphael captured the epic battle where the Archangel Michael vanquished Satan. Beethoven wrote of the desire of man to know God.

And then, somewhere along the way, the devil became largely erased as a factor in popular culture. Any modern educated person who considers the battle between the forces of dark and the forces of light as anything but a mythical allegory is considered … well, not modern today.

But of course, it still persists. The rumors of rock stars making the Faustian bargain still abound, the Rolling Stones had dire repercussions to Sympathy for the Devil at Altamont, and many modern pageants have demonic idolatry built right into their ceremonies.

So I think it’s still relevant. Women and the Dark Side, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

I’m Richard Lloyd Jones, and this is Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head. A quick word of warning right at the beginning of our program today … this is a delicate subject. In a world where speech is often paralyzed, not by an Orwelling Big Brother poised to punish us for deviations from the acceptable, but by our own individual and collective decisions as to what’s correct or now. Straying from the correct-speak causes raised eyebrows and pursed lips at best and outright shunning at worst.

It’s a politically correct world in the world, and the language has been sculpted and massaged and homogenized to remove any unwanted judgements or value statements in a total conviction that this is progress. Politically incorrect is simply not tolerated, a throwback to a time most consider downright evil.

But there’s a problem underneath all this. Unfortunately, not being able to say anything critical about anyone means real defects and problems don’t get pointed out anymore, and all this walking on eggshells means we can’t really develop. And this problem appears particularly formidable when we want to talk women’s pathology.